otherwise a river

on jasmine and jibben

The first time I smelled jasmine, she completely, utterly enveloped me, surprised me. I am on the blat, the stone flooring of my jido’s house in Jibben. It is 2011 and Tata Um Ali is inside the house, sitting on her flowered couch, her knitted blanket warm on her old knees, and her hands laying square on each knee, perfect, parallel, making the most sense in the world. I did not know you, ya yasmeena, until that moment in the dusk of south Lebanon, my bare feet cold on stone ground, the moon hanging so far above the both of us and it was only in the night, when you felt cool and comfortable enough to open your petals, to share your scent with me — it is only in the night that I knew you.

[the prompt for this brief piece was: write about a sensory memory.

a prompt that i learned in a writing class that helped me write this and helps me read it and revise it even though my grandmother just passed: write in the present tense]